Isn't Evolution sort of, kind of, maintained by our fair friends over at Novell/Suse ? Does that have anything to do with this "Death to Evo" thread?
The only over riding reason to _still_ use Evolution is to interface directly to a MS Exchange server.
I happen to use it out of habit, not because it's better/worse. I perceive the mail filtering rules to be easier to configure and more robust than Thunderbird, but that may be _MY_ perception.
As much as I absolutely loath Evolution I tend to agree, the filtering and the way it displays threads seem much more natural than any other mailer I've tried. That doesn't stop the massive amount of unrelated suckage though, like the infamous #217567 wherein Evolution entirely refuses to send mail for no apparent reason or the many other quirks.
Evolution currently is the best of a lot of bad choices, it would be nice if somewhere down the line we could find a replacement, especially one that didn't come bundled with all this groupware functionality all in one app. A simple mailer which can inter-operate with something like Contacts and Dates to make a nicely separated PIM suite which shares information would be ideal in my mind. Anything else seems to be begging for disaster to me, complexity breeds the kind of madness Evolution has become.
Well the tinymail framework is sort of on the way to this. I think evo would be an improved beast if the evo team would start integrated a lot of the work the guys at openedhand have done like some of the memory improvements, the conversion from ORBit to dbus etc. At the moment I think there are 3+ branches of evo code so it would be nice to see some of that merged to actually see what the state of play with evo is.
Peter